Acts of the Apostles

This is a commentary that combines some genuinely helpful feminist, postcolonial and liberationist questions with a number of exegetically and theologically troubling conclusions. It challenged me to notice people whom conventional readings of Acts may leave at the margins—the enslaved woman in Philippi, Philip’s prophetic daughters, widows, the Ethiopian eunuch and women who hosted and supported early communities. Its discussions of slavery, economic exploitation, bodily exclusion and the later misuse of Scripture to restrict women are often worthwhile. Maloney also recognises that God is the true agent of the mission in Acts and that the Twelve have a unique role rather than a continuing line of successors. Nevertheless, I was not impressed by the commentary’s frequent willingness to let imaginative reconstruction override the plain sense of the narrative. Paul’s statement that he was “born” a citizen occurs in an exchange about Roman citizenship, yet Maloney redirects it to citizenship of Tarsus. The Philippian slave has a Pythonic spirit from which Paul releases her, yet the commentary constructs an unsupported scenario in which she is a genuine prophet, may belong to the believers’ prayer group, avoids baptism to preserve her gift and angers Paul because she places him socially on her level. Eutychus is taken up dead and later carried away alive, but the commentary suggests that he may merely have had the wind knocked out of him. Its interpretation of Ananias and Sapphira is similarly unstable: their deaths are made to represent expulsion from the community, although the narrative plainly describes their physical deaths and burials and the commentary itself later acknowledges physical death. The suggestion that the widows in Acts 6 may have held a financial office is presented cautiously, but still rests on uncertain word associations and evidence from centuries later. I also found the sweeping claim that women in Acts are generally “shadows,” “story props” or plot devices difficult to reconcile with the commentary’s own strong treatments of Lydia, Tabitha, Prisca and Mary. Some of the volume’s most controversial contemporary applications, including the use of the eunuch’s baptism to support ecclesial blessing of relationships, come from separately signed contributors and should not simply be attributed to Maloney and Richter Reimer. A better interpretive approach would distinguish carefully between what Luke actually narrates, whether the event happened historically and how it might be applied today. This commentary asks some important questions, but too often seems determined to make Acts conform to contemporary conclusions rather than allowing Scripture to question and shape the reader. I hope other volumes in the series retain its concern for marginalised people while displaying a higher confidence in the authority and intelligibility of the biblical text.